Perfect Fit (Serendipity's Finest) - By Carly Phillips Page 0,91

doesn’t know.”

Joe placed his drink on the counter and strode away, giving them privacy once more.

“Don’t you think she’d want to know?” Sam asked. He tipped his beer bottle to his lips.

“Do not open your mouth,” Mike warned his sibling. “You’re the one always saying that you don’t want her hurt. So let me handle this in my own way.”

“Explain.”

Mike rubbed the cold glass between his palms. “Every time I think about staying for good, my insides twist into painful knots. It’s not something I ever considered. She knows it. Once I tell her all this…things will blow up fast. I need to find the right time and place.”

Sam’s expression showed his disappointment. “And here I thought that you’d been looking pretty settled and happy these last weeks.”

So had he. “As soon as Dad asked me to stay, it was like a noose wrapped around my neck.”

“Don’t you think maybe it’s time to grow up?” Sam asked.

“Go to hell,” Mike muttered, grinding his teeth at his brother’s inability to understand. “Look at my history. I move through life quickly, no time to think too hard or focus too much because any time I did, it felt like I was suffocating.”

“Didn’t look like it last week,” Sam muttered. “Or the week before that.”

His parents had said something similar, but neither of them could possibly comprehend the choking feeling he experienced at the very thought of a commitment like that.

Mike shifted in frustration and decided to dig into his past for examples. “When I was here before, starting out and then again in Atlantic City, walking the beat made me crazy. I couldn’t do what you do every day without going insane. When my superior got me the shot to do undercover in Manhattan, he did it because he knew I needed the excitement. The adrenaline rush.”

Sam expelled a long breath. “Okay, so you aren’t getting that rush in meetings. But do you still need it? Really? Or do you get it from other things in your life? Other people?” Sam leaned in closer. “One woman in particular?”

“I. Don’t. Know.” And that was the crux of the problem. Mike expected to need the variety and the constant thrill. Expected it, but as he thought about his brother’s question, Mike could admit that lately, no, he hadn’t missed the adrenaline rush.

“What about women?” Sam asked. “Since Tiffany, you’ve kept them all at a distance, right?”

“Yeah. No promises, no desire to make any. It worked for me.” He drew a deep breath. “Then Dad got sick and asked me to come home.”

“And you came back to Cara,” his brother said, looking at him with that all-knowing gaze he’d perfected as an interrogator.

Cara did it well too. Mike saw detective in their futures and felt a sudden pang of disappointment that he wouldn’t be the one to promote them.

“Cara’s…different,” Mike admitted. “Every time I’m with her, she unsettles me.”

“And it’s a beautiful thing to see,” Sam said with a shake of his head and loud laughter.

Unsettled was an understatement, Mike thought, remembering how Cara had shaken up his well-ordered life. She still did. Each time he made love to her—and he’d long since stopped trying to convince himself it was just sex—was a huge damned emotional reveal.

But Mike wasn’t going there in detail with Sam. Bad enough he sat here unloading his feelings like some damned girl. Because it was like Cara had unraveled him, piece by piece, leaving him at his most vulnerable, raw and exposed.

A place he’d never been. A feeling he’d never expected to have in this lifetime. And one, combined with the pressure in his career, that had him wanting to run.

“Don’t you get it?” Mike asked his brother. “If I say I’ll stay and I can’t back it up with action, it’ll destroy her.”

Sam let out a low whistle. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered, speaking low. “You love her.”

Mike met his brother’s gaze and didn’t answer. He couldn’t. It was one thing for Mike to think it, another for Sam to say it out loud, he thought, his brother adding to the panic his father had recently instilled.

“She know?” Sam asked, interrupting his thoughts.

“Hell, I barely know how I feel,” he gritted out, wondering how much more he could have thrown at him in a short time.

Mike looked down and realized he was flexing and unflexing his hand into a tight fist. The one thing Mike did know was that he’d always been up front with her. If he left,